Republican voters in South Texas became something of a fixation following the 2020 election when the GOP picked up votes in the region. I explained and analyzed the factors that contributed to the election climate and parsed the numbers in Great Latinxpectations which was published in The Baffler. The ‘Latinos are breaking for the GOP’ […]
Category Archives: Covering Texas
The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers.
If climate change is the existential crisis of our time, then it ought to provoke a reckoning for the news media. For The Nation I analyzed media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on race and inequality, as a preview of the challenge of covering our emerging world of “climate apartheid.” Before statistics […]
My latest piece for CNN analzyes the El Paso massacre as the violent culmination of the ongoing political warfare against Latinos in Texas and the implications for the 2020 election. Find the piece here.
In April I contributed a piece to the Antiracism and America series, a collaboration between the Guardian and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center. In the piece, I explore the U.S.-Mexico border as a solution, not a problematic site, and challenge to the nation’s long history of white supremacy. In the popular imagination and political […]
In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]
The NYTimes’ Room for Debate recently posed this question: Is Criticism of Identity Politics Racist or Long Overdue? Some complain of being unfairly accused of bigotry. Others say discrimination needs to be directly addressed. I was invited to participate on the panel of debaters. Below is my contribution which you can also access here. The attack on political […]
This piece took ten years to place. I first drafted some of the arguments found in my new piece, Trumpworld, in 2006 while I was working at The Washington Post. Then, as now, political chatter centered on border security issues, an “invasion” via the U.S. Mexico border. Politicians and the press considered the function of the border […]
_ This piece seems to be increasingly relevant in this, ahem, interesting, election season. Earlier in the year a “taco war” broke out between Austin and San Antonio after a clearly confused New York-based writer crowned Austin the home of the “breakfast taco.” The outbreak of rhetorical war contained much more than simply a dispute over a […]
This one was special. It was a story in which living it was as necessary as writing it. Searching for La Perdida appeared in the Oxford American’s Texas Music issue. The piece is about finding home by following the music born from our South Texas land. We travel slowly off the ranch and out of the […]
Michelle García 